Silver Ladder, yet another weird site from September

It's hard to tell exactly what Silver Ladder is at first, but after an initial exploration it looks like net art. Silver Ladder's web site consists of a series of sparse HTML pages, very late 90s in style, each with simple, powerful graphics and often some short text. Many of these pages feature an embedded sound file, sometimes for ambience (these footsteps for this corridor), or for complementary content (reading over this text, a Beatles track over a gun image). There are a fewembedded videos. Many pages have hit counters, with numbers in the hundreds or low thousands.

an artificially-engineered transgenic tissue sculpture. It is created using a variety of animal and vegetable DNA strands, which is then mapped onto a host chromosome palette. It is considered to be one of a handful of new species created from the basic building material now available to us through recent breakthroughs in modern science.

The overall effect is hard to describe. There's a distancing effect, as the opacity of images and text refuse our ability to get closer to the material over time. There is also a sense of political outrage or anxiety, with images of authoritarianism, waste, and CIA fear. Moreover the site is disturbing, even creepy. As one navigates page after page, the accumulation of horrific images and uncanny content (skulls, Raudive sounds, dead pigs) suggests something dark, morbid, or threatening.

Unfiction has been all over it, and their discussion leads in two very different, but probably linked directions. Via Myspace we see an alternate reality game (ARG) ramping up. We also learn that this could be a tribute site to Shane Watson, who seems to be dead. More on this in the next post.

Details aside, it's worth relishing the weird power of the first page.
No context, no menu, just a bizarre screen, with difficult to hear sound. It reminds me of watching
tv in the days before cable, late at night, stumbling across bizarre
programs, sliced up by commercials and edits, like blasts from an
alternate history.

silver ladder actually reminds me a lot of jodi.org, which has been in existence since the mid-90s, and i'm pretty sure is continuously updated. jodi.org, though, is purely an art piece. cybersculpture, if you will.